As Wes mentioned in his post to the Jetpack Google Group, we have spun some test builds of SDK 1.12 Beta 1 ( available as a zip archive or a tarball ) and hope that people will take the time to test their existing add-on project with this new version.
Testing your code with 1.12 is particularly important during the Beta cycle as we have landed major changes to how the SDK is organized and some code that uses lower-level functionality may no longer work. We’ve done a lot of work in order to make sure that most use cases will ‘just work’, but we’d love your feedback and in particular we’d like to hear about any issues you might run into.
FAQ
Q: Why are we making this change?
A: The layout change was necessary in order to prepare the SDK APIs to be added to Mozilla central and eventually shipped with Firefox. You can get more information on the overall project to land the APIs in Firefox on this page, and a more detailed description of the layout change on this page.
Q: What sort of errors should I look for?
A: If there is a problem, it will be because the SDK’s loader cannot find a module, causing a fatal error any time you try to run, test or package your add-on. You’ll see an error like this:
ModuleNotFoundError: unable to satisfy: require(path/to/module) from
/Users/jeff/code/jetpack/projects/test/loader_err/lib/main.js:1:
Looked for it in:
/Users/jeff/code/jetpack/projects/test/loader_err/lib/path/to/module.js
/Users/jeff/code/jetpack/addon-sdk/lib/path/to/module.js
/Users/jeff/code/jetpack/projects/test/loader_err/lib/path/to/module.js
If you run into issues like this, we’d like to know about it, either by posting to the Google Group or logging an SDK bug. You can also fix your code immediately by looking at the current layout of the SDK’s apis and correcting the require statement.
Q: I use Builder – how can I test this?
A: You can only test this by downloading the Beta release linked above and using it locally from the command-line. We do not update Builder with Beta revisions of the SDK, and given the scope of the changes we’ve made to the SDK we are currently evaluating what changes Builder requires in order to work with this new version. If you need help installing and using the SDK on the command-line, please see the installation docs.
Got more questions? Please post to the thread in the Google Group – I’ve disabled comments on this blog post in order to centralize any discussion there.